I'll probably need to do a brief introduction to set the context so that people know where I'm coming from. Let's disclaim my professional irrelevance up front.

It turns out that I've been using Emacs for at least 25 years, which is pretty cool. I am 43, so that's more than half my life.

• How I run my life in Org Mode
  • Capture into an inbox on my computer or on my phone (Orgzly Revived + Syncthing),
  • Agenda on either Orgzly or my computer.
  • Several large files that I add a lot of ideas to and slowly chip away at when I have time. I'm still the primary parent for our ten-year-old. Although I have a little bit more focus time now that she (usually) attends virtual school, I still find myself capturing ideas and knowing that I will get to them maybe sometime over the next few years.
• It's a lot of fun to be able to make tiny improvements that add up.
• Speech and audio brain dump workflow
  • On my computer
    • I use dictation to quickly grab some snippets.
    • I can put each sentence on its own line and then use Org Mode to move things around.
    • could demo: fill paragraph cycling, one sentence per line, paragraph mode,
    • For more complicated things, then I'll use Org Mode outlines or maybe start with some kind of sketch.
    • I also type too. It's nice to have that option, especially when there's code.
    • Finding the shape of my thoughts
    • Dictating blog posts into Emacs
    • Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs
      • Voice commands are great when you've run out of keyboard shortcuts or you can't remember them
  • On my phone
    • Audio braindump workflow tweaks: Adding Org Mode hyperlinks to recordings based on keywords
      • I prefer this kind of thinking out loud at my computer, though, because being able to read and restructure the text right away helps me.
    • My mobile use has shifted to practising French with my tongue twisters and audio recordings.
• What I think of Linkarzu and Prot's conversations
  • It's totally okay if you want to stick with NeoVim. I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with!
  • I think the discussions we can have about workflows can cross editor boundaries. =)

Let's start with a summary so that we don't worry about running out of time and so that people don't have to listen to two hours before getting to the good stuff. I want people to be able to get something out of this, whether they're a Vim diehard or experimenting with Helix, or even if they're passionate about things other than text editors. Here are some of the things I'm learning about that I think are important.

• Community:
  • It's really hard to learn Emacs all by yourself. It's obscure, arcane, and overwhelming.
    • Steve Rowe's Blog : Code Editor Learning Curves
    • the learning cliff and the View from the Top
  • Fortunately, we have a strong culture of sharing, starting with the GNU General Public License and continuing through things like literate programming. We have mailing lists, blog posts, videos, meetups, and conferences. One of the best ways to learn Emacs is to learn out loud. Another way is to look over someone's shoulder. It doesn't take a lot of time or money to do the kinds of things that I enjoy doing to connect the Emacs community, and I'd love to see other tech communities experiment with things like that too.
    • Working on the plumbing in a small web community
• Adaptability: You can customize Emacs to really fit the way you want to work. The more people do this, the easier it gets to adapt Emacs to even more workflows.
• Incremental improvements: Even small changes add up, and code turns out to be surprisingly reusable. It often pays off beyond the recommendations of xkcd: Is It Worth the Time?.
• Imagination and play: Tweaking Emacs can be lots of fun. Fun is important.

Quick notes on the stuff he mentioned in the description:

• How I run my life in Org Mode
  • Capture into an inbox on my computer or on my phone (Orgzly Revived + Syncthing),
  • Agenda on either Orgzly or my computer.
  • Several large files that I add a lot of ideas to and slowly chip away at when I have time. I'm still the primary parent for our ten-year-old. Although I have a little bit more focus time now that she (usually) attends virtual school, I still find myself capturing ideas and knowing that I will get to them maybe sometime over the next few years.
• It's a lot of fun to be able to make tiny improvements that add up.
• Speech and audio brain dump workflow
  • On my computer
    • I use dictation to quickly grab some snippets.
    • I can put each sentence on its own line and then use Org Mode to move things around.
    • For more complicated things, then I'll use Org Mode outlines or maybe start with some kind of sketch.
    • I also type too. It's nice to have that option, especially when there's code.
    • Finding the shape of my thoughts
    • Dictating blog posts into Emacs
    • Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs
      • Voice commands are great when you've run out of keyboard shortcuts or you can't remember them
  • On my phone
    • Audio braindump workflow tweaks: Adding Org Mode hyperlinks to recordings based on keywords
      • I prefer this kind of thinking out loud at my computer, though, because being able to read and restructure the text right away helps me.
    • My mobile use has shifted to practising French with my tongue twisters and audio recordings.
• What I think of Linkarzu and Prot's conversations
  • It's totally okay if you want to stick with NeoVim. I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with!
  • I think the discussions we can have about workflows can cross editor boundaries. =)

Here's a brief overview of my history with Emacs, in case anything sparks curiosity.

The details are a little bit fuzzy, but fortunately I've written about some things in previous blog posts. I'd like to flesh this out with an outline and maybe even some sentences or paragraphs later on. I love the way that different themes recur. I find myself building on things that I started exploring years ago. For example, my current interest in hybrid speech interfaces echoes all the way back to M-x doctor and Emacspeak from the beginning.

• M-x doctor:

  • From "Unix Power Tools":

    If you have time to waste (and I mean really waste), Emacs has things to keep you occupied. … If you think you might be in need of a psychotherapist, save your money and try ESC-x doctor RETURN.

    I was not actually looking for a psychotherapist. I think I was seventeen or eighteen, and I was trying to go through all the interesting computer science books in my university's library in the Philippines. I thought it was funny that someone put in that kind of Easter egg. The more I dug around in the source code, the more I was amazed by the things that people had added to Emacs. Anyway, it's interesting how the fun, inconsequential stuff turned out to be the thing that caught my attention.

• Planner Mode: How I got hooked
  • I loved seeing how people customized Emacs in so many different ways to fit the way that their particular brain worked, and getting it to fit my brain too.
  • One time, when I was the maintainer of Planner Mode, I got an email from someone who said something like: "Thank you for maintaining this. By the way, one of your recent changes lost my data and I didn't have any backups, but that's okay, just please fix it, here are some ideas." That kindness mattered a lot to me.
• Emacspeak:
  • In my third or fourth year of university, my laptop screen started glitching. Sometimes it got really low in brightness and contrast, and you could only read it if you tilted it at an extreme angle and looked very carefully. But the Emacspeak folks had figured out how to make it perfectly usable just with speech synthesis, because they needed that as blind or visually impaired users. This turned out to be pretty handy. I not only used that for a fair chunk of my regular writing and coding, but also for my experiments with wearable computing, and for the occasional alert when I was paying attention to something else. Speech synthesis was a lot more discreet than the head-mounted display that I experimented with in 2003.
• flashcard.el:
  • The fun part about this was rigging up my flashcard.el so that it would show me funny cat pictures from ICanHasCheezburger when I answered enough questions correctly. Fun matters.
  • Japanese flashcards
  • More Emacs evangelization: flashcard
• ledger:
  • Keeping (financial) score with Ledger
  • My financial network map and virtual envelope system
• Org Mode: New note-taking workflow with Emacs Org-mode
  • I started using Org Mode as part of research for a book on Emacs. I didn't finish the book, but I stuck with Org Mode. I like the way it fits the way I think and what I want to do.
• Work: Drupal, Rails, blogging, data analysis, literate programming
• Semi-retirement:
  • What did I learn from this experiment with semi-retirement?
  • Continuing my experiment with (semi-)retirement
  • category - experiment
• EmacsConf
  • I helped organize the first one in 2013 in London. I watched the 2015 one remotely. Amin Bandali reached out to me in 2019 to get EmacsConf going again, and we've been organizing it yearly since.
  • Analyzing my Emacs time over the last 11 years or so
• Emacs Chat
• Emacs News: Great way to see all the cool things that people are working on
  • Analyzing Emacs News: 564 posts over 11 years, > 34k items, ~60/post
• Parenting:
  • Braindump from radiostudent.si interview with Lio Novelli and Jurij Podgorsek: Emacs, focused time - parenting, using fragmented time
  • Orgzly Revived helped me stay sane by capturing ideas and making it easy to postpone them for years.
  • Incremental improvements in fragments of time
• Captions: I can even use them to edit videos and audio files in Emacs
  • Editing subtitles in Emacs with subed, with synchronized video playback through mpv
  • category - subed
• SVGs:
  • EmacsConf backstage: scheduling with SVGs
  • Visualizing the balance of speaking in my French conversations with tutors
  • Using Emacs to visualize speaking and target words/phrases in real-ish time
• Minecraft, cubing
  • The kiddo wanted to play Minecraft, but she wasn't comfortable enough with typing yet, so I made her some command books so that she could just click on things in order to teleport back to us or give herself equipment. Now she can type very quickly, but it was helpful back then.
    • Updating my Minecraft command book using Emacs, TRAMP, and mcf.el
    • Using Org Mode tables and Emacs Lisp to create Minecraft Java JSON command books
  • Rubik's cubes:
    • Using Org Babel to learn Rubik's cube algorithms
• Streaming
• French, LLMs
• Speech: speech recognition, speech synthesis, hybrid speech interfaces
  • M-x doctor demonstration
  • Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs

linkarzu mentioned wanting to talk about artificial intelligence. I don't know nearly as much as lots of other people do. Maybe I can just share the things that I've been experimenting with, and also what I care about from a community perspective. I would like to help figure out how to deal with this turbulence and come out the other side happier.